The Grab Bag

January 22, 2001|By Chris Jenkins

The theme of the Michigan Press Association's (MPA) annual winter convention next weekend is "Back to the Basics."

"Basics" might be defined much differently now than when I first ventured into a newsroom almost three decades ago, what with the dawning of Web sites (if you haven't checked out our enhanced www.gaylordheraldtimes.com site yet, surf on over), digital camera equipment and pagination. But we know that being a community newspaper will always mean some very fundamental things. The names and faces of our neighbors - what they're up to, what they're interested in - that's what we're about.

To that end, we're always open to suggestions, ideas, changes.

And while we're proud to be collecting the top honor - Newspaper of the Year for weeklies, circulation 5,000-10,000 - at the MPA Awards Luncheon Jan. 27 for the eighth consecutive year, we are very cognizant we can't rest on our laurels and expect to hit the podium again next year.

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With that said, we continue to make adjustments and additions to our newspaper which will give you more personal ownership.

Among the additions is the annoucement this week of an Arts page, which will be featured the first Saturday of each month. For as long as I can remember, we've received poetry, photographs, the occasional short story or drawing that someone in our community wanted to publish. But before the establishment of our Arts page, we had no real venue to showcase those works.

Now, once a month, we can bring readers a taste of some of the talent in our community. We invite you to submit a poem, an excerpt of a story you've been working on, a photograph of a painting, a sketch or even a brief description of the dance recital or band concert in which you've recently performed.

Ideally, we'll bring you profiles of artists and performers in our community and hook you up with a few more cultural opportunities than we have in the past.

Please, call me or news editor Jeffrey Hogan if you're interested.

Additionally, as a means to preserve that hometown feeling we've always enjoyed in Otsego County, which we all know is just growing by leaps and bounds, we're hoping to launch some "From All Corners" columns. We'll ask special correspondents from Gaylord, Elmira, Waters, Vanderbilt, Johannesburg and even Lewiston to compile tidbits of that folksy news for us to share with you. To accomplish that, we're looking for someone based in each of those communities who likes people, who would get a kick out of taking down a few names and activities of their neighbors and dashing them off to us on a regular basis.

Sound like an assignment for you? If you're already "in the know" for your community, this might just be a fun task for you to consider. Or maybe you know someone who would be the ideal correspondent. We'd like some help recruiting here.

Further, if you have items - anything from "the twins visited Grandma and they baked a chocolate cake from her secret family recipe," to "the grange potluck was a smashing success and Emil's homemade venison sausage was gone in a flash" - consider submitting them to us or our correspondents. It may take us some time to get this rolling, but it's just another way for us to assure you we are your hometown paper, and there are things in the Gaylord Herald Times you'll find nowhere else.

If you're interested in being a correspondent or if you have a name to suggest or a tidbit of "From All Corners" news, call me or news editor Jeffrey Hogan at 732-1111.

- Chris Jenkins is editor of the Gaylord Herald Times. You may write her at PO Box 598, Gaylord, MI 49734, or e-mail her at chris@gaylordheraldtimes.com.